Enable HTTPS and make your entire site secure

Life is full of surprises. One of these days I got a job offering with a consistent budget, one of my former clients approached me to "make his site secure".  I said yes, but when turned out what he wanted in fact i had a surprise: he wanted nothing else, just to make the browser warning about "unsecure site" go away. He actually purchased a security certificate and hired someone to install it onto his server - with no success.

I solved it in two steps, and will share it with you the recipe - for free!

As you might already guessed from introduction, you must have a valid SSL certificate installed on your site. If you don’t have any SSL certificate installed on your server, please contact your hosting provider for support. The most decent hosting companies are offering a free, perfectly valid certificate for your site. Worst case you will be assisted to buy one - an unnecesary waste of money on most cases, with some notable exception.

Assuming that you have already the certificate in place, the "voodoo" can begin!

Don't be scared, it i a simple thing, I am amazed how this simple solution is missed by so many Joomla webmasters.

First step

Let's show you the simple to-do list to activate HTTPS on your whole site:

  • Go to System and click on “Global Configuration”
  • Go to “Server” tab
  • In “Server Settings” section, you will find “Force HTTPS”
  • Select “Entire Site” from the drop-down list
  • Save changes

What's the second step?

It's more complicated, in fact, that the previous one. Grab your favourite bewerage (sometime is a really tough choice, I must admit that) and enjoy it! You just performed some complicated task worth a serious amount of "greens"! ROTFL

BTW, the trick is working only on Joomla 3.*+ sites, so the real tricky part is to get your site there - if you didn't have it already.